Catalog Search Guide
You can search our catalog using different mineral attributes. For example, you can search by color such as green, yellow or purple, or by chemical elements such as uranium, calcium or iron, or by mineral groups such as phosphate, silicate or carbonate. You can also filter by crystal habit like crystal, geode or crystal on matrix, by specimen size such as thumbnail, small, medium or cabinet, and by features such as radioactive or fluorescent minerals.
Turkmenistan
Turkmenistan, occupying the arid heart of Central Asia between the Karakum Desert and the Kopet Dag range, is a lesser-known but genuinely distinctive source of mineral specimens shaped by evaporite basins, karst caves, and Jurassic-to-Quaternary sedimentary sequences. The country's most celebrated locality among collectors is the Kap-Kutan Cave System (also called the Cupp-Coutunn Karst Cave System) in the Kugitangtau Ridge, Lebap Region, a vast gypsum-karst labyrinth famous for exceptional fluorite, calcite, celestine and rare cave minerals formed in a hydrothermal, low-temperature karst environment. Nearby, the Gaurdak basin, with its historic Mine No. 3 near Chardzhou, is the type locality for para-alumohydrocalcite and has produced fine gypsum (including selenite), calcite, halloysite and native sulfur from thick Jurassic potash-bearing evaporite sequences that also hold enormous reserves of sylvite and carnallite.
In the northwest, the Beineu-Kyr deposit in the Tuarkyr Mountains, Ahal Province, is prized by strontium-mineral collectors for its uncommon celestine crystals — tabular and platy, often pale blue to white with striking red hematite inclusions — a look distinct from the more common Malagasy or American material. Other notable occurrences include the Cheleken Peninsula near Türkmenbaşy, where native lead and lead oxychlorides have been documented precipitating in old oil-pipe casings alongside calcite, and the Kougitang lead-zinc deposit, hosting galena, pyrite and sphalerite in Jurassic limestones. Turkmenistan's broader mineral inventory, built on more than 200 identified deposits, includes barite, gypsum, marble, bentonite and kaolin clays, potash salts, and the sulfate deposits of Karabogazgol Bay, one of the world's great natural reservoirs of mirabilite and sodium sulfate.
Collectors seek Turkmen material precisely because it is scarce outside a handful of Soviet-era mineralogical publications and museum collections such as the Fersman Mineralogical Museum — cave-grown fluorite and celestine from Kap-Kutan rarely reached the open market before the 1990s, making well-documented specimens genuinely uncommon. Combined with the striking red-and-white banding of Beineu-Kyr celestine and the type-locality status of Gaurdak for rare hydrated aluminum-calcium carbonates, Turkmenistan offers specialists in Central Asian evaporite and karst mineralogy pieces that are difficult to source anywhere else, each carrying a strong story of remote desert geology and Soviet-era exploration history.
